Tag Archive for: family

The Wedding of the Year: Jam + Cody

“The Art of a Good Marriage” by Wilferd Arlan Peterson

A good marriage must be created. In marriage the “little” things are the big things. It is never being too old to hold hands. It is remembering to say, ”I love you” at least once a day. It is never going to sleep angry. It is having a mutual sense of values, and common objectives. It is standing together and facing the world. It is forming a circle that gathers in the whole family. It is speaking words of appreciation, and demonstrating gratitude in thoughtful ways. It is having the capacity to forgive and forget. It is giving each other an atmosphere in which each can grow. It is a common search for the good and the beautiful. It is not only marrying the right person — it is being the right partner.

October 8th, 2017, Sacramento, California

Anniversary Edition: Remastered Hi-Definition Wedding Video

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Planting a New Seed

Engagements are a special time in a couple’s relationship to reflect on the moments of dating that got them to where they are, and to look forward to the nuptials to come.

Photos from July 12th, 2017:

Cody and I have enjoyed being engaged so much! It truly creates a deeper bond in a relationship to plan a future and wedding together. On August 26, 2017 , we host an engagement party at his parents’ backyard, together with some of our family and friends.

At long last, Jam Milcah and Cody will make their long-time partnership a legal one. After battling dragons together for three years, they have undertaken the perilous journey to relocate from Asia to the USA and to finally make their own private, sacred commitment to each other a public one… to officially join their family houses under one banner in America:

House McKillinit!

One Team, One Dream

(See our wedding website here)

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32 Maxims for Men

Maxims are universal ethical rules of conduct that guide us when we encounter unexpected or difficult situations in life.

It was asked on Quora:

If you could write a rulebook for being a man, what “Man Law” would you write?

Don’t feel limited by anything. Think about what you would want to see in an ideal man. What are the qualities of a good husband, father, brother? What one thing would you want to see in your daughter’s boyfriend or husband?

Here is the wise list of guiding maxims espoused by Dr. Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and clinical psychologist:

  1. Encourage children through play.
  2. Promote the best in people.
  3. Keep the sacred fire burning.
  4. Guard the women and children from harm.
  5. Confront the eternal adversary.
  6. Build the crystal palace.
  7. Confront death with courage and return.
  8. Dare to cut down a tree.
  9. Offer your sons up as a sacrifice to God.
  10. Protect your daughters from exploitation.
  11. Store up wealth for the future.
  12. Consult the ancestral spirits.
  13. Read great books.
  14. Speak the truth about unpleasant things.
  15. Pay close attention.
  16. Make a worthy temple for the Lord.
  17. Keep the howling winds of winter at bay.
  18. Stand up for the oppressed.
  19. Provide a warm and secure home.
  20. Be a prince of peace.
  21. Don’t be too civilized. (related video)
  22. Organize yourself with other men. (related video)
  23. Be faithful to your wife.
  24. Be hospitable to friends and strangers.
  25. Rout the wolves and chase the lions so the shepherds can eat.
  26. Establish a destination – and a path.
  27. Bring heaven to earth.
  28. Take on the sins of the world.
  29. Dig the wells and mine the gold and copper.
  30. Gather everyone to the banquet.
  31. Grow up and take responsibility. (related video)
  32. Resist pride in all things.

[source: Quora]

What would you add? Or what do you think needs more context?

For a more thorough understanding of maxims, see this video about Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy and conscience in the film Kingdom of Heaven, particularly at 1:45

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The Road Not Taken

Luang Prabang

As I sit looking out the window at the mountain, bathed in heavenly rays of light as the sun begins its journey downward to slowly disappear over the summit, I face a situation I have put myself in what feels like a million times before.

Do I join the friend who has been making promises for weeks up in the beautiful mountainous countryside? Or do I endure the long and painful journey back to the big bustling city?

Robert Frost’s words come to my mind:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

At 33, I’ve finally learned about myself that I’m not a city slicker.

But Bangkok, in all its sweaty, greasy, seedy glory, is one step closer to Home. One step closer to my beloved family, who are are on a terrorist-infested tropical island far away.

Freedom means accepting responsibility, and the necessity for making painful decisions.

God only knows what I’m missing. What I may have learned, or who I could have become. I will never know.

But it’s time to stop chasing, and take one step closer to where my heart is, rather than one step further away.

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A Christmas Miracle, and Happy Wishes for 2017

Dear friends,

Another lap around the sun comes to a close. 2016 was filled with its share of challenges, but we’re grateful for several opportunities for healing and growth, and lots of quality family time.

McKibben Christmas

My son Chris turned 2 years old in February. Thankfully his Lolo and Lola were able to make a visit to Thailand to be present for his birthday!

parents visit Chiang Mai

We put 4 stamps in Chris’ passport — taking the family to Malaysia, to the Petronas Twin Towers, spending some months in overcrowded Manila, working tirelessly to get travel documents to visit the USA.

Petronas Twin Towers KL

We flew Jam’s mother on her first airplane in her life to meet us in Cebu, Philippines, for a family weekend on the beach.

family beach holiday

After 3 attempts we finally secured Jam’s US visa, and we spent 3 months in America, giving Chris the chance to finally meet his sick Grandma and the extended family for the first time! We had many fun adventures and got to spend lots of time with my mother, helping her through some intense cancer treatment in Arizona over the summer.

meeting Grandma

cancer treatment center

Chris went to classes at a local school in Sacramento for a few months, and fell in love with another young Filipino-American 3-year-old Thea Rosa! 🙂

California summer

McKibben Tahoe trip

We had a nice family holiday in Lake Tahoe with Great Grandma and Auntie Jaime. We roadtripped down the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, through Hollywood and across the Palm Desert, past Joshua Tree National Park, and into Arizona, just outside of Phoenix to be with Mom during her major surgery.

breast cancer surgery

cancer ward

Mom’s spirits remained high through many months of difficult trials. She recently completed treatment and is finally back in the comfort of home. My sister told me on Christmas Day (and I just confirmed with Mom on the phone Wednesday) the doctors say they can’t find any trace of cancerous cells from the scans!

DSC00671

Thanks to many of you for your warm support and invaluable help during our lengthy struggle to get travel documents and get the family back home to support Mom.

grandma and grandson

family portrait

Now we’re back home in Asia, settling down and making our home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’ve spent 2016 straightening out an injured spine, getting off pain pills and going 100% natural, I did a mountain of inner work, and I’ve just done my second 30-day meditation challenge.

On the Work Front:

Currently I’m working like I haven’t done in years. My book concept is coming along slowly (tentatively called Chasing the Sun), and in 2017, I’m hoping to team up with my good friend Dwight Turner and his organization Courageous Kitchen to finally launch my dream project!

I call it The HERO Project — iterating an exciting new learning framework with our supporters, based around Joseph Campbell’s perennial “Hero’s Journey” monomyth. It’s an early-stage conceptual educational model that I want to develop into online courses, homeschooling curricula, and maybe one day a brick-and-mortar school here in Thailand.

We’ll aim to provide free skills training and experimental educational programs to empower underprivileged children and young adults in Bangkok with entrepreneurial skills, while we also develop a practical online personal development & learning platform with a fun, interesting storytelling style for our supporters. You can read more and support the project here.

I’m also excited for our upcoming Nomad Summit here in Chiang Mai on February 4th! Last year was an incredible event with 230 enthusiastic attendees, and this time around promises to be twice as impactful! Hope to see one or two of you for a visit to sunny Thailand! 🙂

I’ll continue writing here at Thrilling Heroics about all these developments and more in 2017, and sharing the behind-the-scenes journey with Hero Project patrons!

I pray for great opportunities in the New Year for YOU to chase your biggest, wildest dreams! We wish you a very happy holiday season and a prosperous, transformative 2017!

Wherever you are in the world, we hope you’re happy and thriving! Thank you for your love and continued support ️❤️

-Cody, Jam Milcah, and Christopher (from Thailand with love)

happy nomad family

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Moving the Family to Chiang Mai

Quick update: I’m currently in the process of moving my family to Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I’m more focused than I have been for YEARS on my craft, recently re-connected with my purpose and unlocking a flow of creative energy, ideas, and determination. So I’m keeping a bit more to myself, pulling long hours, and doing lots of things that scare me on a daily basis.

Sometimes I feel a little bad for depriving Jam and LittleMan of more quality time, but it’s nice to be a fatherpreneur.

I spend all my time on these things: (in order of time spent)

  • Doing my best to be a good father and role model
  • Working on connecting incredible people in ways I haven’t imagined yet – to help make amazing new things happen
  • Trying to see what happens when we get a lot of REALLY awesome people with BIG ideas together and empower each other to kick more ass than ever before – inside a new group I’m temporarily calling The HERO Project
  • Dreaming about if we can actually get Tim Ferriss & Arnold Schwarzenegger to fulfill their promise to make a motivational video for the HERO Project!
  • FINALLY making time to write new articles, being *really* honest, and sharing my new-found enthusiasm and FIRE inside
  • Working on a book proposal – thanks to Guy Vincent and his encouragement
  • Brainstorming some kind of large-scale movement/organization to help provide more structured guidance to young men, entrepreneurial education, mentorship, etc. to encourage growth into the best men they can be
  • Trying to remember to do a few pushups each day

Those are my top priorities in life right now, and I’m unfortunately without the energy to do much of anything else until I reach the next level.

What I’ve been thinking about lately

If you have questions for me, unfortunately my time is exceptionally precious and therefore expensive now. I can’t always respond properly to the amount of things in my email inbox. It’s full of wonderful people, empowering feedback, and great causes I wish I could get behind, but I have to prioritize my time better now than I ever have. So if you have questions, best to keep them short – I try to interact a fair amount on Twitter, it’s the best place to reach out to me with something succinct.

You can follow my occasional email updates to be kept in the loop about what I’m working on.

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The IMPOSSIBLE List

Anyone motivated to be successful—to really make an impact with your life—has a list of important things they want to do. Things to have, things to be. Places they want to go, people they’d love to meet.

You may not have a list of life goals all written down on paper. You probably keep an immediate to-do list, you might have some of your long-term life goals written down on scraps of paper or word doc lists on your computer here and there, but you know at the very least you have those things somewhere in the back of your mind.

I’ve challenged myself with yearly goals in the last couple years, and I’ve mapped out plans for my businesses and different projects. I don’t frequently achieve everything on my lists, but as my friend Ramit Sethi once told me, if you’re not failing at a couple things each month, you’re not trying hard enough.

And I’ve found that sharing those goals publicly gives me additional motivation and accountability to follow through, and sometimes friends and readers can offer words of advice, help, or partnership on some goals.

I’ve had some pieces of the puzzle in the works for a long time, but I hadn’t put together a comprehensive “bucket list” of things I want to do before I die until recently. It wasn’t until Sean Ogle recently wrote about bucket lists, and how to identify the most important life goals that will enable you to achieve the other items on your list—the travel goals, the possessions, the fun stuff—that I finally got motivated to really solidify my whole life list and put it out here to share with the world.

Several friends and bloggers have compiled great bucket lists that have helped inspire some of the things I decided to put on my list. There’s a mix of places I’d love to jet set, landmarks I’d like to see, adventures I’d like to have, experiences I hope to share with specific friends and family, and of course I immediately took Sean’s advice and prioritized the importance of the enabling goals that will make everything else possible.

So without further ado, here’s my bucket list—or, 84 adventures you can follow me on here at Thrilling Heroics:

Enabling Goals

  1. Develop an online business that earns over $3000/month in passive income.
  2. Build a blog with 10,000+ subscribers.
  3. Write an ebook or launch a digital product that earns $6,000+.
  4. Publish a best-selling book.
  5. Achieve 100% freedom from all debt.
  6. Get an article published in the print edition of Esquire, GQ, Wired, Details, or Maxim magazine.
  7. Leverage my blog audience to make a major positive impact in at least 10 peoples lives (we’ve already helped my friend Ryan, and Tim & Rodrigo (two scholarship awardees at Digital Nomad Academy).
  8. Speak at South by Southwest Interactive and stick around for the music festival in Austin, Texas.
  9. Set up a Hong Kong corporation.
  10. Make at least $200K in a given year.
  11. Get a second passport, and maybe a third too.
  12. Complete my Personal MBA.
  13. Attend an official TED Conference. (Already had the honor of helping plan the locally-organized TEDxBKK!)
  14. Sell my photography and other creative artwork.
  15. Organize a lifestyle business summit (March 2014 in Costa Rica! – a 5 so far SE Asia)

Adventures to Have & Things to Do

  1. Learn to rock climb in Railay Beach, Krabi.
  2. Climb up to the mountaintop Wat Tum Sua Temple in Krabi, Thailand.
  3. Learn to sail.
  4. Climb a volcano.
  5. Eat slow-roasted crispy suckling pig in Bali (delicious babi guling).
  6. Spend a week with friends at Burning Man in the Nevada desert.
  7. Go skydiving. Go skydiving again.
  8. Learn to play guitar.
  9. Reactivate my French and achieve fluency.
  10. Learn to speak conversational Spanish. (half-way there in Colombia 2014)
  11. Get in the best shape of my life with my trainer Tom Frearson.
  12. Replace my morning coffee with Yerba Maté for at least a week.
  13. Get a tattoo with a design from my best friend.
  14. Take my dad to eat real Kobe beef at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant CUT in Los Angeles.
  15. Spend a whole lot more time with my grandfather and learn about his life before he leaves us.
  16. Raise another dog.
  17. Take my best friend Patrick to a Daft Punk concert.
  18. Share a beer with Carlos Miceli in South America. (Sept 2013 in Santiago, Chile)
  19. Settle abroad for at least 3 months elsewhere in Asia, in Central and South America, and Europe.
  20. Live at least 3 months in San Francisco, San Diego, and Austin, Texas.
  21. Work for a month at a winery—like, in the fields, growing grapes—in California or France wine country.
  22. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible Lamborghini.
  23. Camp under the stars on the beach and see the sun rise. (2009 in Prachuap, Thailand)
  24. Participate in the world’s biggest water fight during Thailand’s New Year’s festivities (Songkran).
  25. Do a beach photoshoot with a swimsuit model.
  26. Go to a shooting range and fire off a Kalashnikov rifle and a Desert Eagle .50 Action Express. More importantly, learn to disassemble & reassemble them.
  27. Drive a Tesla Roadster.
  28. Take a gondola along the Venice canals in Italy.
  29. Ride camel back across the Sahara desert.
  30. Take a Serengeti safari in Tanzania and Kenya.
  31. Trek through the jungle on the back of an elephant.
  32. See the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (twice).
  33. See the view from the top of Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
  34. Party on Ibiza for New Year’s Eve in Spain’s Ballearic Islands.
  35. Go to the Glastonbury Festival in England and see Stonehenge.
  36. Participate in the Brazilian Carnaval celebration.
  37. See what Mardi Gras and Voodoo Fest are all about in New Orleans, Louisiana.
  38. Train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with my son.
  39. Learn to surf (took lessons in Bali 2010). Learn to surf properly!
  40. Learn to DJ or mix electronic music.
  41. Own a Ducati motorcycle.
  42. Buy and restore a 1965 or 1966 Shelby Mustang GT350.
  43. Stay in an over-the-water bungalow in beautiful Bora Bora in the French Polynesian islands.
  44. Spontaneously walk into the airport and randomly buy a same-day ticket to wherever looks appealing.
  45. Drive the Amalfi coast near Sorrento, Italy.
  46. Rent a villa on Lake Como or Lake Lugano with friends.
  47. Own a small bar or restaurant with live music.
  48. Leave any wealth or assets I have when I go out to people who really deserve and need them.

Places to Travel & Landmarks to See

  1. The ancient temples at Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  2. The Acropolis and Parthenon in Athens, Greece
  3. The Sistine Chapel and Vatican City in Rome, Italy
  4. The pyramids at Giza, Egypt
  5. Machu Picchu in Peru
  6. The home of the Oracle at Delphi, Greece
  7. The Taj Mahal
  8. The ancient city of Petra, carved into canyon walls in southern Jordan
  9. The Karnak temple and the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt
  10. The Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza near Cancun, Mexico
  11. Iguazu Falls on the Argentina/Brazil border
  12. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy
  13. The Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  14. The Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines
  15. The Borobudur stuppa in Java, Indonesia
  16. Gorgeous Zion National Park, Utah
  17. Niagara Falls lit up at night
  18. Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet
  19. Jerusalem’s Old City
  20. The Hagia Sofia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey
  21. The abbey of Mont-St-Michel in France

You’ll notice I’ve included a few things I’ve already accomplished (plus I come back to update this list every few months, so things are continually getting crossed off).

I’ve also taken Sean’s advice to have a few things that will be easier to achieve, and a few goals I can obtain in the very near future.

I think when you make your own list it’s important to recognize the big things you’ve already done that you’d always dreamed of, and include a few “gimme” goals so you can start off strong and stay motivated.

Of course I expect that my feelings about some items on the list may change throughout the course of my life. I may not achieve everything, some of my goals will change, or I may add new items to the list. But, it’s a starting point and it’s something I can always refer back to to remind me what I want to accomplish.

Of course if there’s anything you can help me achieve, or something you want to join in on, leave a shout out and we’ll talk! 

What’s on Your List?

Take a look at my in-depth breakdown of how to establish meaningful personal and professional goals for yourself in all the important realms of your life. It’s written to help you establish yearly goals, but the principles can be applied to building your own life goals list too.

If you have a bucket list already, share it. If not, take a look at the above articles and get on it! Your time here is short, so remember to value every day you have and make the most of it.

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